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Icy street in Fort Worth, Texas
Photo: Yffy Yossifor / AP
On Sunday evening, US President Joe Biden approved a declaration of emergency for the state because of the unusually harsh winter weather in Texas.
There, on the border with Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people were temporarily without electricity due to the cold.
In a number of houses and apartments, the mostly electric heating failed.
Almost half of the electricity generated from wind turbines in Texas also failed.
Now the network agency of the state of Texas has announced rotating shutdowns of parts of the network to prevent a complete breakdown of the supply.
Initially, around 10,500 megawatts were taken from the grid, which corresponds to the consumption of around two million households, as the ERCOT agency explained.
Poweroutage.us, which tracks power outages, spoke of more than two million customers in Texas without power.
Refinery closed
In the Texan metropolis of Dallas, temperatures of around minus 13 degrees Celsius prevailed on Monday.
In large parts of the state, residents had to deal with snow and ice.
In Texas City, the Marathon Galveston Bay refinery closed much of its facilities due to freezing temperatures, which, according to the weather report, should not rise again until Tuesday afternoon.
Governor Greg Abbott had previously warned that the approaching "winter storm" was "unprecedented" in the strength of the state's history.
He urged all people not to leave their homes if possible to avoid accidents.
Thanks to the emergency declaration, additional help can now be mobilized from the Fema disaster control agency, among others.
According to the national weather service, Arctic air masses are currently moving south - far beyond the areas in which cold otherwise can be expected in the region.
There were storm warnings for much of the US Gulf Coast, for the states of Oklahoma and Missouri.
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